During this procession, from which almost nothing was lacking except the hearses, for a complete representation of Chinese life, the people had been gazing at themselves for four hours straight, as though in a mirror. In a place where there is no great shared effort of construction, one will never be confronted with a festival like this: a parade in which one sees, gaily deployed, the full range of classes and activities is possible only if all these activities have a resonance for every segment of the society that offers itself this entertainment, more substantial than a lavishly produced play, and only if these activities find a common denominator in the great effort of which they are merely varied aspects. The fact that, for so many countries in the world today, the national festival is expressed essentially by a military parade shows to what degree such countries, and such numbers of countries, suffer from an incompatibility of temperament with themselves: far from being able to admire themselves in their everyday clothing in the full light of a good conscience, the people there are invited to contemplate themselves only from the terribly particular point of view of their military function and clothed in a disguise of which no burlesque counterpart is offered by an army of monkeys.
More grace than anywhere else, more ease or candor in joining together genres that are completely different—perhaps it is this that expresses the specifically Chinese nature of the national festival at which I was present. Never to so high a degree as at the time of my discovery of China have I seen a country in which aspects of nature, morphologies of manufactured things, and exteriors of people seem united by a complicity going so far, sometimes, as to materialize in a visible harmony: from landscapes furnished with trees more rounded than ours and with foliage in the shape of rice-powder puffs or feather dusters, to monuments that are not (as is almost the rule in our part of the world) a single edifice served up on a plate or endowed with an exaggerated importance, but rather a group in which empty spaces and approaches count perhaps even more than the constructions themselves, which are also rounded and all mossy with polychrome ornaments, from fish with vaporous fins bathing sometimes in basins of stone whose prodigiously soft patina offsets their density and rigidity, to ideograms so complicated as characters but of a design both so elegant and so firmly balanced in its imaginary frame, from the inert matter that always seems to know subtly how to arrange itself, to the human beings who, even when they are walking quickly, advance most often at a pace regular enough so that they seem to obey a rhythm dictated by the stars much more than respond to the uncertainties and incidents of what they have to do; all this would lead us to believe that from one extreme to the other of the long chain of living beings and objects that form the world of China, no break in continuity appears among the elements (disparate though they are) distributed among the three kingdoms, since one of the essential concerns of this civilization which allows us to speak of China as a “world” seems to have been (and to have remained) precisely that of maintaining or establishing this fabulous harmony.
Beds of flowers surmounted by metal disks, one red, one mauve, as I saw, not on a firing range but at the Nanking train station at the terminus of two railway tracks for which these mingled products of heavy industry and horticulture constituted the buffer-stop; a small crowd of young tomboys in sweat suits either garnet-red or wine (the color almost of glowing embers) frisking about near the Syndicate House in Peking in the light of electric floodlamps, throwing a basketball back and forth; the islet of flowers, also in Peking, that embellished the center of a vast intersection where there rose up like a semaphore the traffic policeman on his platform thus inserted into a ring of stems and corollas; the textile mill with machine tools painted in delicate tones to which signs and drawings of the company newspaper traced with various chalks on large blackboards corresponded here and there as pleasantly as the laughing eyes of the women workers above their antidust masks of white taffeta; urchins of both sexes and even tall adolescents perched on the graveyard sculptures (guardian horse, stele-bearing tortoise, or any other animal that can be climbed) just as in Rome on summer evenings at the monumental fountain of the Piazza Navona clusters of children playing hide-and-seek mingle with the beards of the river gods; the slight hiccup, half laugh and half sob, that often quivers in the throat when an emotional smile uncovers the teeth of a person taking leave of you by squeezing your two hands in thanks—this is what tends to show precisely the rather unusual good fortune it seemed to me that China enjoyed with regard to these sensitive arrangements (the play of paired contrasts or of correspondences either obvious or assumed or even suspended in the problematical expectation of a second term that would perhaps not exist except as a function of our desire to see the echo found in us alone by the supposed first term ascend to the rank of truth), exceptional contingencies whose more or less spontaneous felicity makes one think that a country well and truly possesses grace, if it produces them in quantity. But if, in trying to analyze China’s charm, I resort at last to pleading grace because I can’t justify otherwise the facts I have summoned as evidence, it is certain that I have explained nothing.
All the sorrow of the world in a single cup of wine that will not be drunk, like—near Hangzhou—the mountain suspended in the fat teardrop of a convex mirror, on the pediment of a temple that is not that of the Source of Jade. If I analyze the meaning of these lines (written almost as soon as I returned and based on the conjunction of two memories, the first of which did not have to be located, because its only setting was the false space of a theater stage), might I derive something from them that would help me define what formed the enchantment I experienced?
Except for the Source of Jade, which is here only an embellishment (since this is the name of a temple close to but different from the one in whose pediment the landscape was reflected and whose name, in the course of the walk on which I visited both of them, I neglected to set down), except for the very temple I was talking about (pure element of localization, as is the city of Hangzhou), a cup of wine, a mountain, a mirror are the concrete bases of that sentence which is articulated using the parallelism of the two negations. In preference to what is, to feature what is not; if I have chosen this peculiarity of phrasing it is not, of course, out of a simple taste for preciosity, but because I think I cannot express what China is for me without distancing it by means of the margin I have thus contrived and, perhaps even more, because the truth inherent in that immense country appeared to me of a quality too delicate for one to be able to capture it in the crude presumptuousness of an affirmation instead of seeking, rather, to approach it by taking one’s inspiration from the protocol (based on reserve and moderation) that requires the Chinese systematically to indicate the insufficiency and the lacunae, that is to say the negative aspect, of what they are doing or giving. The cup of wine, the mountain, the mirror: was it from a perspective, here too, of negativity, opposed to all kinds of inflation, that I brought those three terms into play?
The mirror and the cup are counterparts, for one contains the immensity of the mountain and the other a pain just as inordinate, that which, at one of the high points of a Chinese opera which is among the most often performed today, the lover Liano Chan-po experiences when his beloved Chou Ying-tai insinuates that he is not the suitor accepted by her father, a minor squire with a feudal white beard, and when, with all her grace as a rich, refined young girl, she offers him the wine of hospitality, a ludicrous offering for someone who was expecting her hand in marriage. A mountain in a mirror, all the sorrow of the world in a single cup of wine: like a trick in physics-for-fun, immensity reflected in an object of modest dimensions and, as though the extreme of tragic purity should be reflected only by the mirror of theater, a torment that will deliberately not be exteriorized, except in an allusive manner and through all that either of the two lovers can put of themselves into an exchange of gestures and courteous remarks, those lovers who will be so broken by this torment that they will not survive it (the female lover’s black hair-piece falling behind her li
ke a single-paneled curtain with a single loop, the male lover whose rather ducklike way of walking emphasizes his masculine nature, customary in the style of Shaoxing opera, in which all the roles are played by women, some of them in men’s clothing). Reduced to being a jewel on the front of a delicately ornamented edifice (and inserted in one of the judicious combinations of fullness and emptiness that constitute Chinese temples or palaces, with buildings arranged in an ensemble of courtyards or gardens in such a way that the terraces, bridges, and stairways seem to have precedence over them, unlike what we see in Europe, where the esplanade, the park, or the avenue is ordinarily only a jewel case for the monument), the mountain thus denied, in its absence of proportion, and reduced to our scale affirms more intensely its baroque structure as mountain. As for the cup left full, the cup that was there only in order not to be drunk, and whose wine remains intact, like the hoped-for woman now torn from her lover by an old man with chin concealed by an opaque rectangle of snowy whiskers, below a face almost that of a little girl, the emptiness that surrounds it and that is so suddenly perceptible once the cup is abandoned, produces the most glaring significance through the interposition of a less that can be manifested.
After our visit to these temples, of which some were ornamented, toward the top, with a landscape strangely deformed by the strong curvature of the polished surface in which it was reflected, we stopped to drink green tea in a café wide open to the elements and reminiscent of those airy pleasure pavilions in which—in many Chinese paintings or prints—one can discern small gowned figures chatting in the heart of a more or less wild spot; for a good period of time we remained there, ourselves chatting, with our interpreters, while gazing at a mountain stream in which some adolescent girls in cotton jackets and pants were elegantly dipping their feet (a rest after a long walk highlighted by a picnic—what must have been the occupation of that particular one of their schoolgirl days). It was at Hangzhou, that very morning, that we had been shown the curious tempest in a glass of water conceived during the Han Dynasty for the amusement of an emperor: a small house in the museum contains a thick copper basin whose bottom is ornamented with four carved fish and whose edges are provided with two handles gleaming brightly from having been handled so often; asked by the director of the museum or his representative to perform this demonstration for us, a young girl rubs the two handles with her palms, pressing on them (it seems) quite hard and imparting to them a regular back-and-forth motion; like the distant, low booming of a bell, a humming begins; then the water that fills the receptacle starts to shiver, and the vibration propagated in the liquid mass, whose surface is now folded into multiple wrinkles, soon produces delicate projections of droplets that rise and fall.
The excursion at the end of which a few of us had been able to admire the charming and sumptuous plaything consisting of those pocket-sized stormy waters accompanied by a subtle background noise had begun on a lake, in boats rowed by slight but sturdy boatwomen. For the final quick visit to the museum that several of us made (other occupations having been planned for the remainder of our group), I no longer remember which of our interpreters escorted us. Did the two Wangs come with us, a boy and girl who were not brother and sister or even related, despite what a foreigner might conclude from their common patronym, being unaware that “Wang” is one of the most common family names in China? One was Wang Sien, about twenty years old, who had been educated in French Indochina, where his parents, originally from Canton, had settled; a collection taken up by his Viet Minh friends, then under the control of the colonial administration, had provided him with the means to make his way illegally to his true country; slender and handsome under his navy blue cap, which he wore tilted back in the fashion of sailors and modern revolutionaries, he was endowed with a marvelous smile which spread over his blushing face if one showed him the least kindness (for he seemed almost childlike in his shyness). The other was Wang Yuen-chen, whose given name could be translated more or less as “cloud the color of pearl” (a fact in which she took no pride, such poetic appellations being quite common among her people); she came from a southern province where she had fought with the partisans, and was a gentle girl of twenty-seven with a delicate face and charming pointed chin, thoughtful, studious, taking notebook in hand any time she could capture from our conversation some French expression she did not know, and again any time she could extract, from the most knowledgeable among us, some piece of information about her own country; most often serious, she was the one who, beyond her official role as guide, made sure, as hostess, that our stay was agreeable; she was capable of being vivacious, occasionally facetious, and she sometimes laughed with a pretty laugh that justified the pearly cloud of her name; her feet small and quite flat in her masculine shoes, showing ankle socks of a lemon or some other acidic color, she walked (like so many Chinese men or women) with her arms dangling, waddling slightly, at a pace that was slow but so continuous that one wondered just what obstacle could oblige this sort of person to turn back, though she was so petite and graceful, closer to a schoolgirl than a virago, her face docile within the severe frame of her stiff, short-cut hair. Had I wanted to experience The Magic Flute in a revised version, in which Egypt would be replaced by the Far East and freemasonry by Marxism-Leninism, no doubt the two Wangs, boy and girl, could—missing the third person, but quite naturally—be substituted for the three disciples or child genies whose mission appears to be to aid those protected by Zarastro, the priest of light. During the excursion which took up the greater part of our afternoon at Hangzhou did I not, in any case, pass through a setting as fantastic as one could wish to have, for the scene in which one is introduced to the most venerable mysteries? For the mountain stream by whose banks we took our tea flows at the foot of the hill of the Phoenix, with a thousand Buddhas sculpted directly out of the rock at various points in a complicated arrangement that includes abrupt walls and deep, narrow passages and even caves, and which human hands have furnished with innumerable threshold guardians. But throughout that day, as during my entire trip, I was certainly less inclined to dream of magical worlds than to scribble down reference words which would help me, once evening came, to record my observations in a notebook. Thus it is only now that I summon up one of the works I love most, out of all those composed by this musician whose unfettered genius has not been surpassed. I am using it (in a word) as a last resort and as though, relying on a magic issuing from Tamino’s own flute and from his companion Papageno’s Chinese hat or glockenspiel, I hoped at least to cause a little melody to sing over the libretto of these notes of mine, so dry that I rediscover almost nothing in them, now, of what China gave me, and so rapid, at the same time as they are so scattered, that they do not even begin, despite their abundance, to form a documentation that can be rationally used to advantage.
When I reread what I thus wrote in the form of an attentively kept journal—going to bed well after midnight and disturbing with my tardily illuminated desk lamp the first sleep of my roommate, rising if necessary at dawn because of a neglected detail that came back to me in my sleep and that I had to note down without further delay because the new occupations in which I would be engaged early in the day would inevitably thrust it away into oblivion—I can scarcely discover a few recuperable crumbs, in a jumble of pieces of information having to do as much with the history of the theater as with that of the workers’ movement, with the instruction of illiterates as with agrarian reform or with propaganda in favor of hygiene, with what I had seen in one or another institute or museum as with the policy practiced toward minorities in order to transform China into a “multinational State.” Behind a zeal all the more rarely abated because it was perhaps merely a comedy that I played for myself, I wonder today whether a profound indolence was not concealed: to seize on the wing all that passes within your reach demands a smaller effort than systematically to gather documents on two or three given points; it also allows one to choose (in all good conscience, since to observe anything at all represe
nts, in a sense, a certain amount of work) the most attractive of the various programs that are proposed to you. Under the pretext that I had available to me too little time to conduct real investigations (as I did, in Africa and elsewhere, in the course of my several professional trips either in a group or alone), urging so-called scientific scruples for not attempting to study what, even within a narrow time span, could if necessary be studied, but also not daring to abandon any sort of seriousness and behave like a simple flâneur, I opted—conscious or not of my stratagem—for the easiest solution, in other words the middle solution: to make it my goal to visit the greatest possible number of places, like, in fact, a tourist determined not to lose a single moment of a tour he is afraid he will never go on again; to hurry by train or airplane from Peking to Manchuria, from Manchuria to Shanghai, then from Peking as far as Sichuan and almost as far as the border of Burma, which was as fatiguing as it was pleasant; to go from a factory to a monument, from a people’s park to a movie theater, from a conference to a guided tour, from a first-class meal to a show, regaining a semblance of seriousness at the hour when I wrote up my notes, punctually and (as though to prove to myself cheaply that I was a conscientious traveler) losing some time making a fair copy of what I had recorded too elliptically in the course of my peregrinations. As is most often the case with compromises, I was quite wrong to opt for this attenuated solution, and this is, perhaps, one of the reasons why my trip so quickly seemed to me rendered valueless: by not methodically restraining myself, I collected nothing worthwhile except, at best, the crumbs I have spoken of; by trying to capture as much as possible of what I saw or heard, I did not allow myself to live, and, because I did not yield to the rhythm of China without trying to be clever, I was not able to bring back anything from a vast and exalting country but those infinitesimal crumbs. It is certainly a foolhardy enterprise to try to interpret these trifles now: isn’t it unrealistic to take what I embraced so poorly, at the time, that I held only dust in my hands and try retrospectively to make it substantial by examining a few minuscule grains taken from this same dust?
The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3 Page 4
